I don’t have a problem with paying people for their labor, but I do want to have books that I actually own. I’m done paying for things that are locked into a particular corporate app. How do I buy ebooks and audio books that I actually own? Is this even possible in 2025?
Not exactly an answer to your question, but related.
Most of the things I want to read now a days rarely come as audiobooks. If I want to read a scientific paper on anything I’m pretty much resigned to printing that as a PDF (without headers/footers). And then I use apps like https://github.com/foobnix/LibreraReader which let me use my own text to speech engine. I’m quite fond of locally hosting https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx. And on my android phone I use ryan-low since it doesn’t bog down my older phone.